Backyard Football 2006

Mini-athletes play mini-football, but with big problems.

Everybody loves football. There's nothing like the rush of seeing a halfback burn to the outside, spin and change directions to break free towards the endzone. Or a quarterback dropping in a 50-yard pass that barely threads the needle, then seeing the receiver dive sideways and barely take out the pylon as he crosses the endzone. Or predicting a quarterback draw and slamming a two-foot, pigtail wearing, 5-year-old in a pink skirt in the small of her back and watching her writhe in pain. Ah, football. Everybody loves it.

Even children apparently, hence the Backyard Football series. Backyard Football 2006 is aimed at the little tykes in the audience, providing a slightly stripped down version of pigskin with cutesy kids taking the field. Despite its budget price and EA's supposed reign over the entire NFL, Backyard Football 2006 is officially licensed and contains all of the NFL teams and a fair number of its players, though all in childhood form.

The game does a pretty decent job of stripping down the big-kids version of football into something that young kids can digest a little easier, like its slower pacing, simpler stats and the like. But a few other aspects of the game won't be much easier for small kids to learn, like the control scheme. There's still an abundance of basic moves, like spins, jukes, multi-receiver passing and such that, while certainly not over the heads of many kids, is essentially like what you'll find in Madden.

The rub though is that the on-field players do a very poor job of taking care of themselves, so while kids might be able to handle their players a bit easier due to their slightly slower pace, they're actually behind because while the control scheme is nearly identical to something like Madden, the players are so bad that they'll drop passes left and right, pass right into interceptions all day and generally mess up the game so much that it becomes counter-productive to children as they're working against the inabilities of their childhood players rather than having them help out with the most basic tasks, like catching a football.

For example, due to the fact that you can't lead your receivers, practically the only receivers you can pass to safely are those who hit their point and are in their correct position away from the defense. If you try and thread the needle, the defense will intercept the ball time and time again. This means that kids will need to have a great grasp of how routes work to properly nail down a passing game. We're not putting this past them, but it was much easier to complete passes (or at least not get them intercepted) in the original Tecmo Bowl.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you happen to pick the wrong defense your team won't pick up loose receivers and will let them take off down the field unprotected. This obviously results in a touchdown almost every time as it can be really hard to catch up to players who've broken loose.

What is likeable about Backyard Football 2006 is its overall presentation, both with its general look and feel and the way it presents a somewhat simplistic season mode. With regards to the latter, it's easy for kids to jump in and start a season as all they need to do is pick their team from an allocated lot and then play week after week. You can swap positions around, but this is reasonably simple as you don't have any benched players so you don't have to actually manage your lineup. Stats are kept relatively simple, but it's all of the important stuff like touchdowns, passing yards, completion percentage, sacks, etc. etc.

The game doesn't really look very good at all but that's part of its charm. Kids are made up of gigantic, oversized heads and they're so different in stature and height that the teams actually somewhat resemble what a backyard game of football might look like. We're not going to say the game looks great by any means, but it does have its charms.

The Verdict

Backyard Football 2006 is an OK title, but it doesn't quite deliver on the goals that were presented before it. The CPU players, even those on your own team, don't help out the player enough with basic fundamentals like catching and passing, and can actually make it more difficult to perform basic tasks (like completing a pass) than it should be. The game does have its quirky charms though, so little kids might find something to like here.